Tag: writing

What do you want to learn more to master collaborative writing skills?

1. Scientific papers are not like novels where you have a story line to keep the reader interested. Most of the time, it is the content of your finding that actually draws the reader’s attention to your papers. So you need a good abstract and a meaningful header for each sections to make the reader follows. Failure at this means you cannot even reach any readers who are going to actually read your papers.
2. It is about management. Ajarn Wi’s tips is to use the cloud as your extended brain because with the amount of information we handle each day, it is very hard to memorise these things even a couple years back. (I show them the Graduation Party dessert menu in my laptop via the Evernote.comwith tagging and separate categories). So this… is how my long-term memory have survived.
3. & 5. Flow charts that are often used in my fields are UML diagram. They can be drawn in MicrosoftVisio which are available on Mahidol IT software resource via intranet. It is also a Microsoft package similar to Microsoft Office but has to be downloaded separately.
4. In general English writing class I took, the main idea is normally the leading sentence of the paragraph. Overall main idea is the first paragraph of the piece. Well, in real life… it is not like that. If the writer has his/her own style that doesn’t conform to this rules, such as pick one of your classmates’s section, then the main ideas are scattered.
6. SPSS statistical packages and bioinformatics packages are what I picked on demand. I mean when I need to use it, I get to learn it from demo and examples. With this era, it is easier than before because you can choose by the amount of users and stars. I mean both because if it gets average of five stars and three users i.e. his mom, his aunt and his brother, it is incomparable with 4.2 stars with 3,000 users. Normally, I have downloaded the trial version and played until I liked it, then I think of purchasing the package. Normally, bioinformatics packages I used are free. That is a very nice things about my community anyway.

How do you feel about collaborative writing with friends?

Ajarn Wi feels that most of you feel stressed out but it is a good start that finally all of you can managed this. As a scientist, we need to juggle our various responsibilities. One of the skills I gradually learned over the years is to prioritise what is important and what is urgent. There are things like writing papers and thesis which they are normally not urgent but it is very important as it determines when you will be graduated. As a scientist, if you work on for years without publishing you will have a problem with the lack of funding as your work was never recognised by the scientific community. Gregor Mendel is the father of Genetics who get recognised only several years after he died because he published his master piece in such an obscured journal. Why not getting the recognition you deserved while you are still able to enjoy it. Nowadays, you can hardly get a high impact work done alone. You need to collaborate, and by this class you learn to writing with closed friends in real time. Combining 5 authors’ sentences in a docx files when all of you have the same deadline is not fun. If you all are typing real-time, then it is getting less confusing than the whole bunches of docx files.

What skills that you have learned and found that it will be important for you in the future?

I am glad that you all have meet the objective of the course beautifully. Now, you can communicate with your colleagues, multi-tasks, and learned how to read scientific papers. Congratulations to our grown up researchers!

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Ajarn Wi

I'm a lecturer living in Bangkok. I love to work at the interface between Art & Science.